The Language of Men (4 page)

"No, thank you," she says.

"I need it," Anh says. "Please wait inside for when I come back."

I glance down at our useless guide book. We open our doors and the heat nearly drags us out of the car.

Anh smiles, directing us toward a long, brick building. The driver takes off!

"Where is he going?" I ask.

"He park. No very good for parking here. Go inside. I will meet you there."

Vanessa and I approach the brick building. A small plaque beside the door reads:
Handicapped Handicrafts.
These lacquer-painting-and-chopstick emporiums aren't entirely new to us—we'd been dragged to several of them on other tours, our bus unloading us like prize cattle at warehouses full of small Buddhas, medium Buddhas, large Buddhas. But this one is different. We are the only ones here, and the scent of lacquer is dizzying.

"Welcome! Welcome!" a chubby Vietnamese man says, bowing several times with a wide smile. "Come in. Come in."

We follow him past glistening paintings of leopards stalking eagles on tree limbs or large-breasted Vietnamese women dressed in gauzy
ao dais
or Buddhas smiling so wide their faces may burst.

He hands us two baskets.

"For your convenience," he says mechanically, as if reciting a script.

Then I hooked up with one. Used to see her all the time. Thing was, she didn't want money; she wanted, stuff. So I brought her presents. Whatever they had at the PX that week: toasters, razors, TVs, record, players. Chick didn't know Van Morrison from Little Richard, but she wanted that record player, boy. I tell ya. Thing was heavy, too. Lugged it all the way from one side of the base to the other, then took a jeep out to her shack or whatever. Hut.

Kinda awkward, though. I'm in the next room bangin' her while her whole family's makin' dinner. Whole family, Mom and Dad, brothers, sisters, nephews, friggin' John-boy and little Cindy Lou Who. Everybody's there. So after we finish up and we're layin' there and she goes
You hungry, GI?
' I didn't want to be rude, so I says,
'Sure, I could eat.'
Next thing I know I'm at the dinner table with her entire family, fishin' around for some kind of red monkey meat floatin' in my bowl and each time I take a bite her old man starts cacklin'. This guy was really gettin' a kick, out of me eatin' this shit, meanwhile I'm thinkin',
"Hey, asshole, you cooked it."
My girl seemed to be the only one who spoke English so I asked what was so funny and she just said. I put too much food in my mouth. So I smile at the old man and he just keeps cacklin', howlin'—old man's got tears in his eyes. When he finally calms down, he looks at his daughter, then he looks at me. He points to my uniform.
What?' I
say.
What are you pointin' at, old man?'
He points at my uniform again, then points at the wrinkles in his shirt.

"Next time,"
he says.
"You bring iron."

The chubby man takes us through the store and into the back. He tells us this is a very special program that the government was kind enough to establish. "Help a lot of people," he says. This too sounds rehearsed.

In the back of the store is a large workshop, like a factory. A massive cement room divided into different stations: stools and workbenches, chairs and easels. Empty.

"Unfortunately," he says. "Our workers now eat lunch. They very much like visitors."

Instead of introducing us to the workers, the chubby man guides us through a photo gallery. A legless man polishing chopsticks made of bone. A woman missing both arms sculpting a tea cup with her feet. Children in wheelchairs clenching paint brushes in their teeth.

Vanessa and I are silent. This is not an exhibit, not something to gawk at. The workshop conjures up images of The War Remnants Museum on the other side of the city, the place where Vanessa and I, within a mixed crowd of Asians, Europeans, Australians, and Indians stared at disfigured fetuses floating in formaldehyde jars. On the wall were black and white images of women, men and children, some with half a face or no appendages or an arm growing out of the center of their backs—victims of Agent Orange, white phosphorus, napalm.

Above the exhibit:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are LIFE, LIBERTY and the pursuit of HAPPINESS.

Many signs in Vietnam are printed in incorrect English. The original text of the Declaration of Independence capitalizes just the first letter of
life, liberty,
and
happiness.
The additional capital letters on the plaque did not feel like an error, but more an inextricable root of Vietnamese—something not lost, but found in translation.

One of'the hooch girls gave all the guys the clap. You ever get that? Believe me, you'd, know it if you did just drippin', all day. Fun while it lasted, though. Not bad waking up to a naked Asian broad. All the dudes, the white dudes, the brothas, friggin' Sittin' Bulls, didn't matter who you were, you were out there, just like everybody else, cryin' over your busted hose. This chick really did a number on us, boy. I tell ya.

Nothing—just get your meds and wait it out. Boy, you shoulda seen some of the remedies these hicks and backwoods hillbillies came up with. Swear to Christ, one toothless asshole came struttin' out the mess hall with his dick dipped in tapioca pudding. Big grin on his face like he just cured cancer. He wasn't smilin' later when I told him he had to mix up a new batch of pudding.

They pulled her body out the dumpster. Throat cut ear to ear. I don't know. No one fessed up. Wasn't right. Just one of those things, I guess.

After the chubby man finishes the tour of the workshop, he guides us back into the store. We are still the only ones there. A pretty young woman behind the counter watches us as we browse the chopsticks, tea sets, and Buddhas—the same items we've seen in nearly every store in Vietnam. The only difference is the price. A pair of chopsticks is close to twenty U.S. dollars. A small ceramic Buddha nearly fifty U.S. dollars. Our hotel room, which includes breakfast and dinner, is sixteen U.S. dollars. Holding our empty baskets, we wander the aisles, whispering.

"Will that be all?" the cashier asks.

"Yes, please," Vanessa says. "Thank you very much."

The woman nods and wraps up our thirty dollar bamboo spoon.

Outside, Anh is waiting. He glances at the paper bag in Vanessa's hand.

"Ba-nessa! Very nice for you to buy," he says, exhaling a large plume of smoke.

"Yes," she says. "A lot of nice things in there."

Anh steps closer, nodding. "Yes. Yes. Beautiful things. Very good store."

I'm about to ask where the driver is when his car screeches around the side of the building. He hops out, smiling. He opens the doors for us, pointing to my head, warning me to be careful. I nod, and he gently shuts the door. The car is cool, the air conditioning drowning out the traffic. Behind tinted glass, the brick building looks far away, as if cast in permanent dusk. As we pull into traffic, a bus unloads a large group of men and women and children, each one slowly, carefully making their way to the back of the building. I turn to Vanessa and she is also watching the workers. The chubby man guides the last of them into the workshop. I unwrap the tissue paper and look at our new spoon and wonder which of the workers, if any, have ever touched it.

We are only ten minutes away from our hotel. This provides Anh enough time to smoke four cigarettes. His smoking is an art. He is a master of blowing rings. He displays impressive restraint, allowing the ash to grow nearly two inches before knocking it out the window. Sometimes he performs a French inhale. But Anh is not a showoff. Each one of his smoking tricks I glimpse from the backseat, his face reflected in the side-view mirror.

A group of new arrivals—large white men with backpacks—wait outside the hotel, unsure if they have the correct address. We stand beside the car for a moment, thanking Anh for his assistance. He bows.

I realize we don't have any more cash. Vanessa offers to run into the hotel to use the ATM. I glance at her before she leaves. She smiles, assuring me she won't take long.

Anh lights a cigarette and stares at the men standing outside the hotel.

"They have Heroes in United States?"

I stare at him. He takes a long drag.

"What?"

"Heroes," he says, holding up his wrinkled pack of cigarettes.

"Oh," I say, nearly laughing. "No, I don't think we do."

He nods.

Vanessa returns with the money and hands it to Anh.

"Thank you, again," she says.

He slips the folded bills into his shirt pocket.

"Enjoy the rest of Vietnam."

VANESSA SPENDS the next morning at the clinic helping women construct vaginas from colored paper and cotton balls. One woman forms a massive replica out of poster board and cuts a hole in the center through which another woman with spiky black hair pokes her head, as if she is posing in a wooden cut-out of Mickey Mouse. Some of the women are in their early twenties, some late fifties. They are sex workers or partners of injection drug users, or both. None of the women have received an adequate sex or anatomy class. Their knowledge is based on myths and hysteria, perpetuated by stigma and silence.

Stand, up after intercourse to prevent pregnancy.

An abortion is when the doctor chops up the fetus with tiny knives and sucks the remains out with a vacuum.

AIDS is transmittable by kissing.

The term "sex worker" sounded odd to me and didn't have the same connotations as prostitute, hooker, or "ho," as my father would say. I pictured naked women in hard hats with tool belts full of dildos, carrying their lunches in red and white Playmate coolers. But after listening to Vanessa describe the women's lives, stories of incest and rape, how many of the women were seen as "damaged goods" and exiled from their families, the hours they spent servicing ten or twenty men a day, their sweaty and dusty commute from village to city, "sex worker" seemed most appropriate. Sex is the job, and they tried not to bring their work home.

I spend my days sitting in cafés or in one of the large wooden chairs in the hotel lobby, flipping through
Let the Good Times Roll,
a collection of oral histories of Asian female prostitutes living near U.S. military bases. I had read the books written by American GIs and Vietnamese soldiers, and the few written by U.S. Army wives and Vietnamese women, but these books gave no voice to Vietnamese sex workers. I could recite Matthew Modine's complete monologues from
Full Metal Jacket,
but I only knew three words spoken by a Vietnamese prostitute in the film:
Me so horny.

Before our trip, I had searched for recent oral histories of Vietnamese women, but found nothing. Instead, each time I typed "Vietnam" and "prostitution" into a search engine, I was offered opportunities to meet "exotic" and "eager" women. After giving my contact information to hotels in Vietnam, I started getting e-mails with subjects like,
ARE YOU CURIOUS?
or ones that were not so subtle:
FUCK A GOOK TONIGHT!
The body of these e-mails were written in a tone that assumed I had been searching desperately for these women, that I should look no further, that they were waiting and willing.
Here for the taking.

The women in
Let the Good Times Roll
are from the Philippines, Okinawa, and South Korea. They speak about growing up too poor to attend school. Their elderly parents couldn't maintain the rice fields or coconut trees on their own, so the young girls had to stay home and help bring in the harvest. The girls were often raped by relatives or local villagers. If the man was a relative, the rape was kept a secret, so as not to disgrace the family.

If the girl was raped by a man who was
not
a relative, the woman's family and tradition dictated that the two must marry because no other man would want her. Nan Hee, a thirty-three-year-old Korean woman who worked as a "bar girl" near Camp Casey, a U.S. base in Uijongbu in South Korea, spoke about her husband: "I lived with him half because I loved him and half because he raped me and I had no choice."

I flip back and forth between
Let the Good Times Roll
and Richard Bernstein's
The East, the West, and Sex,
a four-hundred-year history of Western exploitation of the East. In the late 1800s, British soldiers stationed in India—many married, devout Christians—relayed their sexual conquests to comrades in Britain: tales of "nut-brown" women fulfilling every desire, detailing the coveted world of harems in a land where the restrictive moral and religious codes of home seemed not to apply. Reverberations of these tales can be heard in the French's colonization of Indochina in the early 1900s. The French followed Britain's lead and developed their own form of "regulated prostitution," in which sex workers were routinely tested for venereal disease and could not perform sexual labor for any French soldiers until they were "cleared."

Soldiers were not subject to the same testing. If a soldier showed symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease, their supervisors questioned them about recent sexual activity. The woman suspected of spreading the disease to the soldier was apprehended, tested and, if she was indeed infected, forced to undergo treatment at her own expense before returning to work. The soldier was ordered to remain on base, where he received free health care. While prostitution was illegal in France, the laws were not enforced in the colonies.

I take out my tape recorder and listen to my father recount his own stories of an exotic, seemingly lawless place where he balanced boredom with sex. He took R&R in Vung Tau, a fishing village on the southern coast, the town Robert Duvall in
Apocalypse Now
claims has the best surfing in Vietnam. My father lived in a hotel on the beach where women nodded at his words and he at theirs. Accepting his proposals, his promises. His toasters. His televisions.